Tony Jaa’s action scenes take a lot of work to film. Let’s look at the facts: If a scene calls for 60 ninjas, it takes 10 weeks to find them, even if they’re in the same elevator as you. Then you have to teach them all the choreography so they’re not just randomly vanishing or turning into dragons. By the time you’re done, all your camera men are cut in half because that’s how people sharpen their swords in Thailand.

Now the real problem is that every scene in the movie is like that. It goes from insane fight scene to epic war scene like someone stuffed cocaine and focus testing data into a Nintendo until it finished a screenplay. The Persian army would have looked at the call sheet for Ong Bak 2 and said, “Where the fuck are we going to get 1600 archers? And 3800 nunchucks!? That’s got to be like twice the entire world’s nunchuck population.”

This grueling pace apparently took its toll on Tony Jaa, who had to direct, train and kick the shit out of every single able-bodied actor in the country. Luckily, all Thai hospitals have a Tony Jaa wing where they treat victims of Tony Jaa. Unluckily, there is no branch of Thai medicine devoted to treating Tony Jaa himself. So after fighting off dozens of 15th century armies, he had a nervous breakdown and disappeared into the jungle, halting production for months.

Tony Jaa has since debunked this rumor, saying production stopped over some kind of money issue. But I got all this information off the Internet, so I’m going to choose to believe the jungle one.